Quotes About A Musician

#1. I think I turned to writing really just to wake up in the morning and be a musician and to have something to do, and feel like a musician every day even if I wasn't working.

Lesley Gore

#2. One of the reasons my father ... became a dentist was so he could always be home for dinner and spend weekends with his family. At one point he had thought about being a musician, but he said, I'm not going to do that because I'd be on the road all the time and I wouldn't be with my family.

Dean Ornish

#3. If you date a musician, you're never, ever really gonna be first either. You're gonna be right behind the music and maybe right close.

Gary Allan

#4. When I'm doing just music all the time, it can get really overwhelming. It's always challenging to switch it up a bit. And just because you're a musician, it doesn't mean that music is your only creative outlet.

Bat For Lashes

#5. My father slapped my thighs with a variety of meats until I began to cry and sulked in the corner. I later became a musician

Thom Yorke

#6. My best business decision was to be independent as a musician and artist. My worst was compromising on certain aspects of a deal for the sake of other members of my group when I shouldn't have, because I was right in the end.

Ziggy Marley

#7. Drummers shouldn't just think of themselves as drummers. If you're going to be a musician, you should expand your horizons, compose things, and work with other instruments.

Stewart Copeland

#8. It sounds kind of stupid, but I've never not wanted to be a musician. It's been inside me since I was little so I don't know what else I would do.

Zola Jesus

#9. So I don't think of myself as just a musician at all, I think of myself as an artist.

Santigold

#10. My dad, bless him, was a musician. And his dad had thought that his music was rubbish.

Paul McCartney

#11. And I think that's why I was going to be a musician. I was very rebellious. And I didn't want to be an actor. My father used to say to me you should be an actor if you want to be in the arts.

Katey Sagal

#12. Then I was lucky I met with my future husband, and I started new life with my husband, and I was happy again. He was a musician. I start to travel with him through Europe also and around the former Soviet Union.

Olga Korbut

#13. I always wanted to be a musician, 100 percent, my whole life. I went to school, I did music theory, I did voice training and piano lessons, and while I was a decent musician, it didn't seem like enough for me. I felt like I wanted to make more than just music.

Adria Petty

#14. As both a musician and a former teacher, I feel that music is as important to kids as reading and writing.

Sheryl Crow

#15. As a musician, life is not over just because you are getting older, and so I find retirement a very frightening and dark thought.

Ian Anderson

#16. My gift's primarily literary. That being said, I ended up a musician. By the time I made the bluegrass record ... I'm more impressed with myself when I push the envelope musically than I am when I push it literality.

Steve Earle

#17. Those who have expressed doubts and misgivings about their ability to live this kind of life shouldn't try, because being a musician is not something you chose to be, it is something you are.

Billy Joel

#18. It's very interesting for me to listen to music with my wife. She's not a musician but she very often makes comments about pieces in ways that are similar to what I'm thinking.

Paul Lansky

#19. As a musician usually music is your way out.

Damon Albarn

#20. I don't come from a musical family at all, but I realized early on I was a musician. I started begging for a piano when I was 6 years old.

Jason Robert Brown

#21. Of course, I would be depressed sometimes, and my Mom would be worried about me because I would just sleep to escape. Cause I was so scared of being a musician or artist, or whatever you want to call it.

Chantal Kreviazuk

#22. I'm just lucky to have great parents. My sister's an actress. My brother's a musician. I found it hard growing up in such a ... creatively driven family. I wanted to have this thing to create, myself.

Grace Gummer

#23. Madonna is a pro. I don't like her and have no respect for her but- I don't think she should be called a musician or a dancer or whatever you know, but I do have, well I do have respect for her ability to completely manipulate the media and have them work for her.

Jon Fishman

#24. And there are certain songs that are really timepieces and shouldn't be touched. But some of them are a celebration of good humour and sensibility and I think that's okay. I don't care about the past, I'm a musician with ambition.

Robert Plant

#25. The thing is that I'm an actor first, and in 'Once,' I was able to be a musician and a singer as well as an actor.

Steve Kazee

#26. Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.

Andre Malraux

#27. I haven't done any genealogical exploring myself, though members of my family and also of my husband's family have traced things back. I have a great grandfather on my mother's side who was a musician, and I'd like to know more about his life.

Kim Edwards

#28. When I was 21 or 22, I realized I was never going to be something else - I had to be a musician. I can't commit to anything unless I love it.

Chet Faker

#29. A grandmaster must memorize thousands of chess duels in his head, as these are for him what words of the mother tongue are to the ordinary people and what notes are to a musician.

Garry Kasparov

#30. I think I'm an okay parent, but I'd put myself in the category of a musician-who-happened-to-become-a-father. I'm definitely not a father-who-happened-to-be-a-musician.

Jack Bruce

#31. Of course, it does depend on the people, but sometimes I'm invited places to kind of brighten up a dinner table like a musician who'll play the piano after dinner, and I know you're not really invited for yourself. You're just an ornament.

Marilyn Monroe

#32. I played guitar when I was a kid a little bit. I can tool around with a guitar, but I'm certainly not a musician.

Matt Ross

#33. It was clear from the beginning that I was going to be a musician.

Andrew Gold

#34. An entrepreneur is like a musician creating a new song.

Ehab Atalla

#35. I was a musician first before anything.

Jencarlos Canela

#36. I'm so into music that I just stop and listen, whenever there's music on. That's the problem with being a musician for so long. I can get lost in the bassline, fascinated with the arrangement, curious about the production. I can't shut it out.

Derek Sivers

#37. When a musician is conveying that fresh feeling, that's what appeals to me, even more so than the style.

Joseph Trapanese

#38. Most of the people in my family were pretty funny. Everyone had a good sense of humor. I came to California right after college, wanting to be a musician.

Andy Kindler

#39. I find the fact that so few people buy albums to be strangely emancipating. There's absolutely no reason for 99% of musicians making albums to think about actually selling albums. So as a musician you can just make an album for the love of making albums.

Moby

#40. Put you energy into music. If it fails you, you can become an accountant or a dentist. And then if you become a dentist or an accountant, it's too late to become a musician afterwards.

Peter Tork

#41. Not only was he not mad, but he was a musician, and my favorite men had always been musicians or writers or anything that involved the creative process and behaving like tortured artists ... I found financial insecurity a great aphrodisiac.

Marian Keyes

#42. Edible names are what drives me as a musician. My next band will be called the Hot Dogs.

Chad Smith

#43. You kind of hope as a musician that you get some recognition for what you do, and when you do, it's nice. It's a really good feeling.

Alex Clare

#44. I always hesitate when people call me a musician.I have had no musical training. I can't play anything. I really think of myself as a performer. It's always been writing for me. I evolved with my band in rock 'n' roll through poetry, not through music.

Patti Smith

#45. As a musician, I don't think I'm the greatest guitar player. I'm a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.

Daron Malakian

#46. Basically, at some point, one day maybe you can expect to hear some of my music. I haven't really done that yet because my younger brother is a musician and really talented and I want him to come out with his music first.

Stephen Dorff

#47. When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can't not be a musician.

Debbie Davies

#48. There's a responsibility as a musician to do the music that you want to hear.

El-P

#49. A musician's attempt to summarize his or her work leads to all this prescriptive chatter, or what I call the 'Modifier's Madness.' A lot of adjectives working overtime.

Sufjan Stevens

#50. But, I would be naive not to recognize the number of musicians who tell me they have been influenced by me and sight me - as well as Alex and Neil - as a musician who has been a positive influence on their playing.

Geddy Lee

#51. I am not fundamentally a musician, I am fundamentally a human being.

Herbie Hancock

#52. The real test of a musician is live performance. It's one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.

Neil Peart

#53. Due to my work as a musician, songwriter, recording artist and author, hundreds of people stream in and out of my basement studio to help me with my creative projects.

Dan Hill

#54. As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that's what I do, too.

Richie Sambora

#55. I don't know where I would be without music. Even if I wasn't a musician, I think music is God. In a lot of ways, it's my saving grave. It's been my religion since I was a little kid.

Allie Gonino

#56. Whether it's an attorney or a bond trader or a journalist, or a musician or pastor, you want to do your best. You don't want to seek acclaim. You don't want to seek awards. You want to seek to do your best at what God's given you.

Louie Giglio

#57. I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like the little-magazine writer.

Barry Hannah

#58. What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.

Roscoe Mitchell

#59. In Africa I discovered what the true purpose of a musician is. We are historians, and it is our purpose to tell the people the true story of our past, and to extend a better vision of the future.

Randy Weston

#60. I tried to make guitars that were close to what my heroes played. That's the way it's done. My experience is that you have to do it like a musician. You have to learn the language before you can learn to be a novelist.

Paul Reed Smith

#61. Being a musician is to live, not to survive. Surviving is going to work every day and giving up your liberty and your time. When you do music, it's a free life.

Richard Pinhas

#62. If you're a musician, you can practice your guitar every day and write songs, but when you're an actor, you can't just like burst into a monologue. Your only exercise is when you're in prep or you're working.

Winona Ryder

#63. I think if you are a musician, and artist, you have to have a certain courage. Repeating yourself or photocopying other's art... it's cowardice. If you actually risk your career to do something new, even if it's in a very small way, then it's art.

Thomas Gabriel Fischer

#64. He led quite a great life, ... He was an Old Testament figure railing against the establishment - a Jewish guy from New York who became a Buddhist, a poet, a musician.

Tom Hayden

#65. I ain't no entertainer, and ain't trying to be one. I am one thing, a musician.

Miles Davis

#66. I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.

Molly Ringwald

#67. I hope America sees I am a goofy guy andI'm kind a crazy, I hope they see that I am a musician aswell, that I have music all around my body - I'm just exfoliating music, and I just hope America sees that.

Casey Abrams

#68. I've speculated about what my life might have been like as a musician, but I'm afraid I came to the conclusion that I probably would've either been teaching piano or maybe gotten to play at Nordstrom's department store.

Condoleezza Rice

#69. A madman is not less a musician than you or myself; only the instrument on which he plays is a little out of tune.

Kahlil Gibran

#70. To gain confidence, constant practice is essential. Just as a musician needs to practice regularly to retain his touch, the watercolourist needs to be constantly in touch with the medium.

Robert A. Lovett

#71. I don't think I ever thought of growing up to be anything other than a musician. There really wasn't a plan B. Well, a kind of a distant plan B was to be a Formula One driver, but there really wasn't an entry point.

J. D. Souther

#72. As a musician, I've accomplished what I hoped to accomplish.

Rickie Lee Jones

#73. As I moved through my life as a statue and later as a musician, I started to understand. There's a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen.

Amanda Palmer

#74. I am a musician. My passion for music has obliterated everything in its path for my entire life.

Barry Manilow

#75. I love being a drummer but I love being a musician in general and I love the Foo fighters.

Dave Grohl

#76. I don't really like to call myself a brand, and I don't like to think of myself as a brand. I'm a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that's not my focus.

Beyonce Knowles

#77. My father was a musician, and I've always loved writing. I grew up in New York City during a time when hip hop music was surrounding you with the hip hop culture, and it felt natural. I was a really huge fan of the music.

El-P

#78. I became a musician because I love music, and that is what has sustained me; it's not because I thought it was a great way to make a living. Music saved my life.

David Sanborn

#79. TLC has helped me to know that as a musician, I can talk about anything; that there are no barriers, and that you can be yourself. That's what I love about them. Left Eye in particular helped me to stay on top of my A game. She's one of the best female MCs that I've heard.

Lil' Mama

#80. He begged hard, and said he couldn't play - a plausible excuse, but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the country that could.

Mark Twain

#81. Owning a handgun doesn't make you armed any more than owning a guitar makes you a musician.

Jeff Cooper

#82. Don't forget, I was a musician long before I ever met Prince. That's a big difference between me and those other women he's worked with. We operate on the same plane, as equals.

Sheila E.

#83. My priorities now a a musician are so different now than they were as a kid. Everyone wants to be a rock star, and I wanted that too; I wanted to be on magazines and be running around the world and having all the fun.

Blake Judd

#84. I've been around two years shy of 50 years doing what I do. I am a musician.

Frankie Avalon

#85. Being a musician is a noble profession.

Paul Weller

#86. Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.

Charles De Lint

#87. What I like about being a musician is that I find the thing soothing, but I also give the soothing to other people;

Sinead O'Connor

#88. I am very self-critical, but that's a good thing because it keeps me growing as a human being and as a musician.

Ray Lamontagne

#89. Whenever I heard a musician do something that I could not explain, I went back to the theory in order to figure it out.

George Russell

#90. I am a musician, ya know; music is my world.

Stephen Marley

#91. 'Musician' is not a very respected title. I'm not a musician.

Lydia Lunch

#92. If a musician dares to get out of the box he's been put in, people get confused. They want people where they can find them! I am fortunate in some respects as I've always been known as someone who 'moves around' and tries different things. But generally, we are supposed to stay where we're put.

Phil Collins

#93. Yes, I'm a musician. I also like to play with others, sometimes more, sometimes less.

Klaus Schulze

#94. Your development as a musician will come to an eventual standtill if you do not develop yourself as a human being. Only by having a creative, expansive and inspiring life can you create creative, expansive and inspiring music.

Carl Orr

#95. I've always been admired as a musician and painter but not spiritual writer, and that's why God's an artist, not priest.

Robin Sacredfire

#96. Music is entirely subjective. I was thinking that for myself, for songwriting and what I like to listen to, to help motivate me as a songwriter, as a musician, there are certain things I lean towards and certain things I don't.

Marnie Stern

#97. High school and college were my punk, formative years. I was playing hardcore, learning to be a musician. In bands, you tour, but you're paid nothing; you're playing to 50 people in a basement, sleeping in a van, and you love it.

Steve Aoki

#98. Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme.

John Szarkowski

#99. Anybody who'd expend energy preventing people from hearing music seems not to understand the basic principal of making music in the first place. It's so antithetical to being a musician.

Jeff Tweedy

#100. To me, seeing a really great comedian is a bit like watching a musician or a poet.

Dick Gregory